Alastair Maitland obituary

Alastair Maitland was a bridge between the European and American ways of life, and a critical friend of both

My uncle Alastair Maitland, who has died aged 95, was a diplomat, essayist and francophile who spent his latter years avidly following world affairs from the tranquillity of his adopted home in Massachusetts.

Alastair was born in Kampala, Uganda, where my Scottish grandfather, Thomas, was a colonial service botanist. The second of four sons, he grew up in Edinburgh and was a talented golfer. He gained a first-class degree in French and Spanish from Edinburgh University before joining the Foreign Office in 1938.

His 37-year career took him to Ottawa, where he met his first wife, Betty Hamilton, and then London, Cairo and Paris. A strong believer in multilateral diplomacy and the movement towards European integration, he derived greatest satisfaction from his four years in Paris in the 1950s with the UK delegation to the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, which was created in response to the postwar Marshall Plan. In 1953 he helped draft the Marshall scholarships programme. Prominent recipients of these at British universities included the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

From 1958 Alastair served successively as consul-general in New Orleans, Jerusalem and Cleveland, Ohio, for which he was made a CBE. He became director-general of British trade development in New York before his final post as consul-general in Boston.

On retirement in 1975, he and Betty settled in an 18th-century farmhouse in Heath, Massachusetts. They spent the winters in Paris, from where he contributed a finely crafted weekly column on French politics and society to the Berkshire Eagle newspaper of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Alastair was a bridge between the European and American ways of life, and a critical friend of both. He and Betty, who died in 1981, became US citizens and he threw himself into local community activities. Unfailingly courteous, he was also an excellent raconteur and mimic.

He is survived by his second wife, Hazel Porter, with whom he had recently celebrated 25 years of marriage, his three children, three stepchildren and their families.

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